Do you use Netflix? Did you ever use Netflix? I did and ended up cancelling after a few months. The problem was, I didn’t want to dedicate 2 hours of my time to watching a movie. 200 hours/month or more of time surfing the net was OK but hey, that’s another story. Having access to a huge supply of movies didn’t change that. There just weren’t that many movies that I really wanted to watch. ...
My Great Lesson in Cash Flow is a nice article on the importance of cash flow in a start up. No deep lessons but just emphasizing that you have to watch the cash, watch the cash, watch the cash …
It’s tough coming up with a decent domain name - all the good ones are taken. But you have to wonder what some people were thinking when they came up with these domain names: Who Represents? - www.whorepresents.com Pen Island - www.penisland.com and 8 more worst company urls
Pete Cashmore of Mashable writes that Jobster has relaunched as a social networking site for job seeking. Theory is that you can connect with people and add faves. You can add tags to other users, which has interesting implications: who’s going to be the first to be labeled “brown noser”? “Meet Your Future” is their slogan, which has Big Brother-ish overtones to me. Though I suppose they don’t actually have pictures of a McDonald’s fryer or a Wal-Mart cash register. ...
I love how easy FireFox makes it to enter passwords and forget them. But sometimes it turns out to be a problem when I need to remember them. Like when I’m using a different computer or want to change my password. Today, I found Unhide Passwords, a FF extension that will show you your password when you roll the mouse pointer over the password field. It’s easy to disable when you don’t want passwords revealed but it’s already proven useful twice today. ...
As a native Portlander, there’s a little bit of a thrill every time the Rose Festival starts. Every June, it’s a celebration of living in Portland. There are 3 parades but the Grand Floral Parade is the big one. It’s a Portland tradition that people tape out space on the sidewalk to sit or stand and watch the parade go by. And people basically respect those pieces of tape. What seems a little ridiculous, though, is companies like Azumano Travel taping out the sidewalk in front of their offices, the restaurants next door and then taking half a block across the street. You might think that people would think that was excessive and ignore it … which is why Azumano has a security guard patrolling “their turf”. ...
Really liked the article Is Google Badly Designed? on Google Blogoscoped. He talks about the design considerations with Yahoo and Google and their home pages. I thought it was interesting that Google was viewed as “friendly” because of its simplicity. Clearly Yahoo puts a lot of information on its page but it also feels very corporate. From what I read, Google is having trouble getting people to use its other features. It’d be interesting to know what to degree this is because they’re not displayed the way that Yahoo’s are …
Just ran across two articles showing the graphical changes to the home pages - www.yahoo.com for Yahoo and www.google.com for Google - over the past few years. It’s neat to see this. One of the things that I find personally frustrating about the real world is driving past a place … and seeing a vacant spot where a building used to be. What was there? I can’t remember. So it warms some of my neurons to see the old pages and say “Oh, yeah, I remember that …” ...
Found a reference to Mozy in PC Magazine. If you are looking to backup a small amount of files - 2GB or less - it’s absolutely free. Even at 20GB, it’s only $40/year. That’s much cheaper than the competition. They do require you to get a weekly newsletter that I bet is full of ads. Don’t know, since I haven’t gotten one yet. But that seems less obtrusive than having ads every time you read mail. ...
Lawrence Lessig has a fascinating article on how the State of California tried to simplify preparing taxes. It used payroll information to do a “ReadyReturn” that could be just signed and returned. Or they could use the info on it to make their own return. Of course, the tax preparation lobby started to pressure for the test program to be abandoned. Which is ridiculous. And some lawmakers listened. Which is more ridiculous. ...